A snowball’s chance?

So what really happened to radiation-burn victims Betty Cash, and Vicki and Colby Landrum outside Houston on the evening of Dec. 29, 1980? They claimed their car was blocked by a glowing, diamond-shaped UFO on said date, and that the object was surrounded by 20-plus military helicopters, including twin-rotor Army Chinooks. It’s a well-chronicled story, and not even the Army Inspector General’s report could dismiss it as a hoax. However, it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, account for the military aircraft reported on the scene by multiple witnesses.

“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.” ― Margaret Atwood/CREDIT: info-wars.org

Retired Army Col. John Alexander is sticking to a contention raised in his 2011 book, UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities — the Defense Department knows nothing about this subject, and the phenomenon is far more bizarre than anyone could ever suspect. “Whatever the widget (UFO) was, it projected holograms or put things in people’s minds,” Alexander says. “There was a thorough investigation to find the helicopters, and they absolutely could not find them.”

He argues that any harassment of military personnel who speak up about UFOs was/is conducted by lower-ranking officials with no authority to do so. So certain is Alexander that no military policy-level censorship of UFO data exists, he issued a written appeal last week to SecDef chief Leon Panetta, CIA director David Petraeus, and National Intelligence Director Gen. James Clapper to formally release military veterans from their security oaths on UFO matters. “I suspect I’ll get a form letter back, one of those ‘thank you for your interest’ letters,” he says from his home in Las Vegas. “We’ll see.”

By contrast, former MUFON International Director John Schuessler and lead investigator on the Cash-Landrum Incident is “99 percent confident” the military was up to its eyeballs in that event. Furthermore, he suspects that any sort of amnesty the feds might extend to military witnesses to encounters like Cash-Landrum would be fruitless.

“What have they got to gain, after all these years? People don’t usually do things like this except for personal gain, usually money,” says Schuessler, who dismisses Alexander’s hologram theory as bunk. In fact, during the buildup to the 50-year anniversary of the Roswell Incident, USAF Secretary Sheila Widnall in 1994 extended blanket amnesty to any veterans with inside dope on that maddening affair. Not a single witness stepped forward. Maybe those guys were all dead by then. Or maybe Schuessler is right.

“I think amnesty would be great, quite honestly, but the Catch-22 is, where do you stop it? It opens up a Pandora’s box. I mean, there are real threats to this country and I don’t think the public has a right to know everything that goes on at Area 51 or Los Alamos.”

What Schuessler and Alexander agree on is that “de facto amnesty” is already in effect. Countless veterans have shared their experiences — e.g., the Rendlesham Forest episode in 1980 — without being court-martialed. Indeed, as UFOs and Nukes author Robert Hastings notes, scores of USAF veterans have gone on record in his 2008 book or at his 2010 press conference without being prosecuted for spilling the beans.

Writes Hastings, “Not a single one of my former or retired USAF sources has ever suffered legal or other untoward repercussions as the result of speaking to me about their involvement in a still-classified nuclear weapons-related UFO incident.”

De Void’s two cents: The Pentagon doesn’t have the stones to give Alexander what he wants. That would force the USAF to admit its 40-year-old press release on UFOs is a sham. And the mainstream media might actually pay attention to that.